Feediscovery

At Superfeedr, we believe we have to do one thing only in the best way it can be done: make feeds real-time.

There are a ton of small feature requests that our users ask for and that aren’t part of this grand scheme. One of the most common ones is feed discovery.

A lot of apps that are built using Superfeedr allow their users to type in any site url. Since Superfeedr only deals with feeds, it means that these apps have to

Download this specific page,

Parse the HTML

Extract the <link> tags to get the corresponding feed(s) urls.

It’s definitely not a very hard thing to do, yet, there is* absolutely no reason that everybody should write the same code over and over* for that basic purpose. Obviously, you could use great libraries such as feedbag, yet, these libraries are language-centric (Ruby in this case).

We built feediscovery : a simple – in the cloud! – feed discovery API. To use it, send a GET request to http://feediscovery.appspot.com/ with the url parameter from which you’d like to extract feeds from. The app should return a small json string of the feed(s) information (href, title, rel, type).